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Carlos: Help! I’m anxious to hear from you. I’ll be in my room and won’t leave it until I hear from you. Tomorrow is the last day for...
Carlos: I left town because I started 1)bugging out again. I stayed up all night to finish a take-home make-up exam and am typing it to hand in on the 10th. It was due on the 5th. P.S. I’m going to the dentist. Pain is pretty bad.
Carlos: Here follows 2)a tale of woe. I went home this weekend, had to help my Mom, and caught a fever, so didn’t have much time to study. My professor…
Who are these wretched supplicants,
scribbling notes so 3)laden with anxiety, seeking such miracles of postponement and 4)balm? They are men and women who belong to 5)Branford College, one of the twelve 6)residential colleges at 7)Yale University, and the messages are just a few of the hundreds that they left for their dean, Carlos Hortas—often slipped under his door at 4 a.m.—last year.
Nobody could doubt that the notes are real. In their urgency and their 8)gallows humor they are 9)authentic voices of a generation that is panicky to succeed.
My own connection with the message writers is that I am 10)Master of Branford College. I live in its 11)Gothic 12)quadrangle and know the students well. I am 13)privy to their hopes and fears—and also to their stereo music and their piercing cries in the dead of night.
Mainly I try to remind them that the road ahead is a long one and that it will have more unexpected turns than they think. There will be plenty of time to change jobs, change careers, change whole attitudes and approaches. However, they just want a map—right now—that they can follow 14)unswervingly to career security, financial security and social security.
What I wish, for all students, is some release from the 15)clammy grip of the future. I wish them a chance to savor each segment of their education as an experience in itself and not as a 16)grim preparation for the next step. I wish them the right to experiment, to 17)trip and fall, to learn that defeat is as instructive as victory and is not the end of the world.
I see four kinds of pressure working on college students today: economic pressure, parental pressure, peer pressure, and 18)self-induced pressure. It is easy to look around for 19)villains—to blame the colleges for charging too much money, the professors for assigning too much work, the parents for pushing their children too far, the students for driving themselves too hard. But there are no villains, only victims.
First, they live in a brutal economy. Tuition, room, and 20)board at most private colleges now comes to at least $7,000, not counting books and fees. Tuition covers only 60% of what it costs to
educate a student, and ordinarily the remainder comes from what colleges receive in 21)endowments, 22)grants, and gifts. Now the remainder keeps being swallowed by the cruel costs—higher every year—of just opening the doors. Everything is up.
Along with economic pressure goes parental pressure. Inevitably, the two are deeply intertwined.
I see many students taking 23)premedical courses
with joyless 24)tenacity. They go off to their labs as if they were going to the dentist. It saddens me because I know them in other corners of their life as cheerful people.
“Do you want to go to medical school?” I ask them.
“I guess so,” they say, without conviction, or “Not really.”
“Then why are you going?”
“Well, my parents want me to be a doctor.
They’re paying all this money and...”
Poor students, poor parents. They are caught in one of the oldest webs of love and duty and guilt. The parents mean well; they are trying to steer their children toward a secure future. But the children want to major in history or classics—subjects with no “practical” value. Where’s the payoff on the 25)humanities? It’s not easy to persuade such loving parents that the humanities do, indeed, pay off. The intellectual 26)faculties developed by studying subjects like history and classics—an ability to synthesize and relate, to weigh cause and effect, to see events in perspective—are just the faculties that make creative leaders in business or almost any general field. Still, many fathers would rather put their money on courses that point toward a specific profession—courses that are pre-law, premedical, pre-business, or as I sometimes put it, “pre-rich.”
But the pressure on students is severe. They are truly torn. One part of them feels obligated to fulfill their parents’
expectations; after all, their parents are older and presumably wiser. Another part tells them that the expectations that are right for their parents are not right for them.
Peer pressure and self-induced
pressure are also intertwined, and they begin almost at the beginning of freshman year.
“I had a freshman student I’ll call Linda,” one dean told me, “who came in and said she was under terrible pressure because her roommate, Barbara, was much brighter and studied all the time. I couldn’t tell her that Barbara had come in two hours earlier to say the same thing about Linda.”
The story is almost funny—except that it’s not. It’s symptomatic of all the pressures put together. When every student thinks
every other student is working harder and doing better, the only solution is to study harder still. I see students going off to the library every night after dinner and coming back when it closes at midnight. I wish they would sometimes forget about their peers and go to a movie.
Ultimately, it will be the student’s own business to break the circles in which they are trapped. They are too young to be prisoners of their parents’ dreams and their classmates’ fears. They must be 27)jolted into believing in themselves as unique men and women who have the power to shape their own future.
“College should be 28)open-ended; at the end, it should open many, many roads. Instead, students are choosing their goal in advance, and their choices narrow as they go along. It’s almost as if they think that the country has been 29)codified in the type of jobs that exist—that they’ve got to fit into certain 30)slots, and therefore, fit into the best-paying slot,” says Carlos Horta. “They ought to 31)take chances. Not taking chances will lead to a life of colorless mediocrity. They’ll
be comfortable. But something in the spirit will be missing.”
I want to tell students that there is no one “right” way to get ahead—that each of them is a different person, starting from a different point and 32)bound for a different destination. I want to tell them that change is a 33)tonic, and that all the slots are not codified, nor the frontiers closed.
卡洛斯：救命啊！我急切盼望收到您的回信。我会一直待在屋子里不出去，除非收到您的回信。明天是……的最后一天了。
卡洛斯：我出了城，因为我又开始逃课了。我熬了个通宵做那份带回家的补考题，现在正在把答案输入电脑以便赶在10号交上去。本来5号就得交的。另外：我还要去看牙医，牙痛死了。
卡洛斯：真是祸不单行。我这周末回了趟家，要帮妈妈干活，结果发烧了，所以没多少时间用来学习。我的教授……
胡乱写下这满纸焦虑、寻求着安慰并巴望作业能延期这个奇迹发生的这些可怜的恳求者，都是些什么人呢？他们是耶鲁大学12个寄宿制学院之一 ——布兰福德学院的学生们。这些纸条只不过是他们的教务长卡洛斯·霍泰斯去年收到的几百张纸条里的区区几张而已，纸条通常是在凌晨4点时从门缝塞进来的。
没有人会怀疑这些纸条的真实性。它们既语气急切，又表现出大难临头时的幽默，它们是唯恐不能成功的一代人的真实声音。
我和纸条作者们的关联在于，我是布兰福德学院的院长。我住在该学院的哥特式四方院子里，跟学生们很熟悉。对于他们的希冀和恐惧，我私下里知情；而对于他们的立体声音乐和夜深人静时刺耳的叫声，我亦领教颇多。
我主要想提醒他们，前面的路很漫长，有不少他们预料不到的转折，也会有很多时间来更换工作、转变职业方向，乃至全盘改变人生态度及做事方法。然而，他们却只想立刻拥有一张可以始终依凭的地图，以便获得职业、财产和社会地位上的保障。
我希望所有的学生都能从如何把握前途的焦虑中解脱出来。我希望他们将学习过程中的每一个环节视为体验的机会，而不是为了下一步所作的残酷准备。我希望他们有权试验，有权失足跌倒，有权了解失败像成功一样有益，失败并不意味着世界末日的到来。
在我看来，当代大学生面临着四种压力：经济压力，父母压力，同辈压力和自设压力。追究祸根是轻而易举的——可以归咎于大学收费太高，教授布置作业太多，来自父母的压力太重，学生自我驱策太过。但其实没有祸根，只有受害者。
首先，他们生活在残酷的经济体系里：大部分私立院校的学费和食宿费现在最低也要7千美元，这尚不包括书本费和杂费。培育一名大学生的费用中，学费只占据其中的60%，其余部分通常来自大学所收到的赠款、授予物和赠品。如今，只要一打开门办校，成本年年上涨，其余部分的价值因而不断缩水。样样东西都涨价了。
伴随着经济压力而来的便是来自父母的压力。这两样不可避免地紧紧交缠着。
我看到有很多学生毫无乐趣地坚持学习医学院预科的课程。他们去实验室就像去看牙医一样痛苦。这令我深感悲哀，因为我知道他们其他时候是很快乐的。
“你们想上医学院吗？”我问他们。
“我想是吧，”他们回答，不是很肯定，或是“不是很想”。
“那你们干吗上呢？”
“唉，我父母要我当医生，他们负担全部费用，所以……”
可怜的学生们，可怜的父母们。他们被困在一张最古老的由爱与责任以及负疚感交错的网中。父母们初衷良善，他们试图引导自己的儿女们通往一个有保障的未来。只是儿女们想主修的是历史或文学—— 一些不“实用”的专业。读人文科学的回报在哪里呢？要说服爱心拳拳的父母们人文科学确有回报，不是件容易的事。学习历史和文学之类的学科所获得的智力——综合、相互联系、通因明果、洞察深入——正是那些在商界乃至几乎一切领域具有创造力的领袖所必需的能力。然而，许多父亲们仍然宁愿将金钱花在职业指向明确的课程上——法律预科、医学预科，商业预科——我有时称之为“财富预科”。
然而学生身上的压力就非常严重了。他们真的备受折磨。一方面他们觉得有义务实现父母的期望，毕竟父母比自己年长，应该较为见多识广。另一方面，他们又觉得父母的期望对于父母是合适的，但对于自己却未必合适。
同辈压力和自设压力也是交缠着的，而且几乎从大一新生一进校门就开始了。
“我有个名叫琳达的一年级学生，”一位系主任告诉我说，“她走进来，说她的室友芭芭拉给她造成极大的压力，因为芭芭拉比她聪明多了，而且一天到晚都在学习。我不能告诉她芭芭拉两个小时前刚刚来过，说了一番和琳达一样的话。”
这件事近乎可笑——其实并不可笑。这是重重压力之下显现的症候。当每个学生都认为别的学生更刻苦，学得更好时，唯一的解决办法就只有自己再加把劲。我看到学生们每天晚饭后便钻进图书馆，直到午夜闭馆时才出来。我倒希望他们有时候能忘掉自己的同辈，去看场电影。
要挣脱自困其中的怪圈，最终还得靠学生们自己。他们还年轻，不应该被父母的期望和同学间的忧虑所囚禁。他们必须被当头棒喝，相信自己是独一无二的人，有力量塑造自己的未来。
“大学应该是开放且没有框架限制的，到最后，它应该敞开许许多多条道路。而学生们却事先就设定了目标，一路走来，他们的选择变得越来越狭窄。他们仿佛认为这个国家已将所有的现存工种编成了不可更易的法典，他们只能适应某个固定的职位，因此当然要适应报酬最优厚的职位了，”卡洛斯·霍泰斯说道，“他们应该冒一下险。不然难免终生都平庸而无趣。他们会过得舒适，然而精神上会有缺失。”
我想告诉学生们，并没有一条“正确的”道路等在前方——每个人都是独特的，都有不同的起点，并前往不同的目的地。我想告诉他们，变化是一种激励，而且并不是一切位置都已固定，也不是一切都有疆界限制。
Carlos: I left town because I started 1)bugging out again. I stayed up all night to finish a take-home make-up exam and am typing it to hand in on the 10th. It was due on the 5th. P.S. I’m going to the dentist. Pain is pretty bad.
Carlos: Here follows 2)a tale of woe. I went home this weekend, had to help my Mom, and caught a fever, so didn’t have much time to study. My professor…
Who are these wretched supplicants,
scribbling notes so 3)laden with anxiety, seeking such miracles of postponement and 4)balm? They are men and women who belong to 5)Branford College, one of the twelve 6)residential colleges at 7)Yale University, and the messages are just a few of the hundreds that they left for their dean, Carlos Hortas—often slipped under his door at 4 a.m.—last year.
Nobody could doubt that the notes are real. In their urgency and their 8)gallows humor they are 9)authentic voices of a generation that is panicky to succeed.
My own connection with the message writers is that I am 10)Master of Branford College. I live in its 11)Gothic 12)quadrangle and know the students well. I am 13)privy to their hopes and fears—and also to their stereo music and their piercing cries in the dead of night.
Mainly I try to remind them that the road ahead is a long one and that it will have more unexpected turns than they think. There will be plenty of time to change jobs, change careers, change whole attitudes and approaches. However, they just want a map—right now—that they can follow 14)unswervingly to career security, financial security and social security.
What I wish, for all students, is some release from the 15)clammy grip of the future. I wish them a chance to savor each segment of their education as an experience in itself and not as a 16)grim preparation for the next step. I wish them the right to experiment, to 17)trip and fall, to learn that defeat is as instructive as victory and is not the end of the world.
I see four kinds of pressure working on college students today: economic pressure, parental pressure, peer pressure, and 18)self-induced pressure. It is easy to look around for 19)villains—to blame the colleges for charging too much money, the professors for assigning too much work, the parents for pushing their children too far, the students for driving themselves too hard. But there are no villains, only victims.
First, they live in a brutal economy. Tuition, room, and 20)board at most private colleges now comes to at least $7,000, not counting books and fees. Tuition covers only 60% of what it costs to
educate a student, and ordinarily the remainder comes from what colleges receive in 21)endowments, 22)grants, and gifts. Now the remainder keeps being swallowed by the cruel costs—higher every year—of just opening the doors. Everything is up.
Along with economic pressure goes parental pressure. Inevitably, the two are deeply intertwined.
I see many students taking 23)premedical courses
with joyless 24)tenacity. They go off to their labs as if they were going to the dentist. It saddens me because I know them in other corners of their life as cheerful people.
“Do you want to go to medical school?” I ask them.
“I guess so,” they say, without conviction, or “Not really.”
“Then why are you going?”
“Well, my parents want me to be a doctor.
They’re paying all this money and...”
Poor students, poor parents. They are caught in one of the oldest webs of love and duty and guilt. The parents mean well; they are trying to steer their children toward a secure future. But the children want to major in history or classics—subjects with no “practical” value. Where’s the payoff on the 25)humanities? It’s not easy to persuade such loving parents that the humanities do, indeed, pay off. The intellectual 26)faculties developed by studying subjects like history and classics—an ability to synthesize and relate, to weigh cause and effect, to see events in perspective—are just the faculties that make creative leaders in business or almost any general field. Still, many fathers would rather put their money on courses that point toward a specific profession—courses that are pre-law, premedical, pre-business, or as I sometimes put it, “pre-rich.”
But the pressure on students is severe. They are truly torn. One part of them feels obligated to fulfill their parents’
expectations; after all, their parents are older and presumably wiser. Another part tells them that the expectations that are right for their parents are not right for them.
Peer pressure and self-induced
pressure are also intertwined, and they begin almost at the beginning of freshman year.
“I had a freshman student I’ll call Linda,” one dean told me, “who came in and said she was under terrible pressure because her roommate, Barbara, was much brighter and studied all the time. I couldn’t tell her that Barbara had come in two hours earlier to say the same thing about Linda.”
The story is almost funny—except that it’s not. It’s symptomatic of all the pressures put together. When every student thinks
every other student is working harder and doing better, the only solution is to study harder still. I see students going off to the library every night after dinner and coming back when it closes at midnight. I wish they would sometimes forget about their peers and go to a movie.
Ultimately, it will be the student’s own business to break the circles in which they are trapped. They are too young to be prisoners of their parents’ dreams and their classmates’ fears. They must be 27)jolted into believing in themselves as unique men and women who have the power to shape their own future.
“College should be 28)open-ended; at the end, it should open many, many roads. Instead, students are choosing their goal in advance, and their choices narrow as they go along. It’s almost as if they think that the country has been 29)codified in the type of jobs that exist—that they’ve got to fit into certain 30)slots, and therefore, fit into the best-paying slot,” says Carlos Horta. “They ought to 31)take chances. Not taking chances will lead to a life of colorless mediocrity. They’ll
be comfortable. But something in the spirit will be missing.”
I want to tell students that there is no one “right” way to get ahead—that each of them is a different person, starting from a different point and 32)bound for a different destination. I want to tell them that change is a 33)tonic, and that all the slots are not codified, nor the frontiers closed.
卡洛斯：救命啊！我急切盼望收到您的回信。我会一直待在屋子里不出去，除非收到您的回信。明天是……的最后一天了。
卡洛斯：我出了城，因为我又开始逃课了。我熬了个通宵做那份带回家的补考题，现在正在把答案输入电脑以便赶在10号交上去。本来5号就得交的。另外：我还要去看牙医，牙痛死了。
卡洛斯：真是祸不单行。我这周末回了趟家，要帮妈妈干活，结果发烧了，所以没多少时间用来学习。我的教授……
胡乱写下这满纸焦虑、寻求着安慰并巴望作业能延期这个奇迹发生的这些可怜的恳求者，都是些什么人呢？他们是耶鲁大学12个寄宿制学院之一 ——布兰福德学院的学生们。这些纸条只不过是他们的教务长卡洛斯·霍泰斯去年收到的几百张纸条里的区区几张而已，纸条通常是在凌晨4点时从门缝塞进来的。
没有人会怀疑这些纸条的真实性。它们既语气急切，又表现出大难临头时的幽默，它们是唯恐不能成功的一代人的真实声音。
我和纸条作者们的关联在于，我是布兰福德学院的院长。我住在该学院的哥特式四方院子里，跟学生们很熟悉。对于他们的希冀和恐惧，我私下里知情；而对于他们的立体声音乐和夜深人静时刺耳的叫声，我亦领教颇多。
我主要想提醒他们，前面的路很漫长，有不少他们预料不到的转折，也会有很多时间来更换工作、转变职业方向，乃至全盘改变人生态度及做事方法。然而，他们却只想立刻拥有一张可以始终依凭的地图，以便获得职业、财产和社会地位上的保障。
我希望所有的学生都能从如何把握前途的焦虑中解脱出来。我希望他们将学习过程中的每一个环节视为体验的机会，而不是为了下一步所作的残酷准备。我希望他们有权试验，有权失足跌倒，有权了解失败像成功一样有益，失败并不意味着世界末日的到来。
在我看来，当代大学生面临着四种压力：经济压力，父母压力，同辈压力和自设压力。追究祸根是轻而易举的——可以归咎于大学收费太高，教授布置作业太多，来自父母的压力太重，学生自我驱策太过。但其实没有祸根，只有受害者。
首先，他们生活在残酷的经济体系里：大部分私立院校的学费和食宿费现在最低也要7千美元，这尚不包括书本费和杂费。培育一名大学生的费用中，学费只占据其中的60%，其余部分通常来自大学所收到的赠款、授予物和赠品。如今，只要一打开门办校，成本年年上涨，其余部分的价值因而不断缩水。样样东西都涨价了。
伴随着经济压力而来的便是来自父母的压力。这两样不可避免地紧紧交缠着。
我看到有很多学生毫无乐趣地坚持学习医学院预科的课程。他们去实验室就像去看牙医一样痛苦。这令我深感悲哀，因为我知道他们其他时候是很快乐的。
“你们想上医学院吗？”我问他们。
“我想是吧，”他们回答，不是很肯定，或是“不是很想”。
“那你们干吗上呢？”
“唉，我父母要我当医生，他们负担全部费用，所以……”
可怜的学生们，可怜的父母们。他们被困在一张最古老的由爱与责任以及负疚感交错的网中。父母们初衷良善，他们试图引导自己的儿女们通往一个有保障的未来。只是儿女们想主修的是历史或文学—— 一些不“实用”的专业。读人文科学的回报在哪里呢？要说服爱心拳拳的父母们人文科学确有回报，不是件容易的事。学习历史和文学之类的学科所获得的智力——综合、相互联系、通因明果、洞察深入——正是那些在商界乃至几乎一切领域具有创造力的领袖所必需的能力。然而，许多父亲们仍然宁愿将金钱花在职业指向明确的课程上——法律预科、医学预科，商业预科——我有时称之为“财富预科”。
然而学生身上的压力就非常严重了。他们真的备受折磨。一方面他们觉得有义务实现父母的期望，毕竟父母比自己年长，应该较为见多识广。另一方面，他们又觉得父母的期望对于父母是合适的，但对于自己却未必合适。
同辈压力和自设压力也是交缠着的，而且几乎从大一新生一进校门就开始了。
“我有个名叫琳达的一年级学生，”一位系主任告诉我说，“她走进来，说她的室友芭芭拉给她造成极大的压力，因为芭芭拉比她聪明多了，而且一天到晚都在学习。我不能告诉她芭芭拉两个小时前刚刚来过，说了一番和琳达一样的话。”
这件事近乎可笑——其实并不可笑。这是重重压力之下显现的症候。当每个学生都认为别的学生更刻苦，学得更好时，唯一的解决办法就只有自己再加把劲。我看到学生们每天晚饭后便钻进图书馆，直到午夜闭馆时才出来。我倒希望他们有时候能忘掉自己的同辈，去看场电影。
要挣脱自困其中的怪圈，最终还得靠学生们自己。他们还年轻，不应该被父母的期望和同学间的忧虑所囚禁。他们必须被当头棒喝，相信自己是独一无二的人，有力量塑造自己的未来。
“大学应该是开放且没有框架限制的，到最后，它应该敞开许许多多条道路。而学生们却事先就设定了目标，一路走来，他们的选择变得越来越狭窄。他们仿佛认为这个国家已将所有的现存工种编成了不可更易的法典，他们只能适应某个固定的职位，因此当然要适应报酬最优厚的职位了，”卡洛斯·霍泰斯说道，“他们应该冒一下险。不然难免终生都平庸而无趣。他们会过得舒适，然而精神上会有缺失。”
我想告诉学生们，并没有一条“正确的”道路等在前方——每个人都是独特的，都有不同的起点，并前往不同的目的地。我想告诉他们，变化是一种激励，而且并不是一切位置都已固定，也不是一切都有疆界限制。